 Well, 2019 was marked by some severe natural disasters and the worst of all them was probably waging wildfires in Brazil and Russia. Only in summer alone they wiped out completely around four million hectares of forest there and as a Russian-born citizen for me that was a really tragic news so I started researching into the topic and how it came to this. I found out that the wildfires could have actually been prevented if not for the mistreatment of authorities. Just look at these statements. Amazon is bigger than Europe. How would you put out wildfires on such a big territory? Or here is a quote from a congressman and a governor from Russia. Wildfires are natural, we've never put them out so why starting? Well, these statements at least I had a feeling they're completely logically wrong and this was a moment of realization, huge realization for me. I understood at that point that our daily life and our society as a whole is influenced hugely by political decisions based on flawed logic. So this is how I got interested on the term logical fallacies and now let me explain to you what they are in a really simple manner. First of all, logical fallacies, imagine you're in the discussion. Typically there is you and your opponent and you're trying to make a claim B. You just say B is right and your opponent says no. So you disagree? What would you typically try to do? First, the first way to persuade the opponent is to try to bring as many arguments as possible to prove your claim and this arrow in the middle by the way is called logical connection or inference. So in logic science. And the whole structure is actually called logical form and it reads like this. If A is true then B is true as well. But what are logical fallacies then? Well, a logical fallacy occurs when you start messing around with all of that structure. A first type could be if you just provide a wrong argument. Another type of a fallacy could be that the argument itself is correct but you draw different or flawed conclusions from it. Another type is when you completely replace the topic of the discussion and you start deviating. It is very important to mention that logical fallacies can occur unintentionally as well as on purpose. So some people they just don't realize that their reasoning is flawed. But some people, especially eager to prove their point, they do them on purpose and they don't stop there. Actually they move on and they start involving other elements of the discussion to prove their point. For example, they can attack your personality, they can use ambiguous language and they can even play with the emotions or feelings of the audience to gain their attention. Well, in total there are more of 150 different fallacies, at least on Wikipedia. We don't need to go through all of them. Let's focus on quite a few today. I will bring a couple of examples for every of these type of logical fallacies. So without further ado, let's start. The first example would be a loaded question. So loaded question by definition is a question which contains a very questionable assumption in it. So sometimes it's depicted as a question mark with a bomb. And why a bomb? Because this question is basically acts as a bomb in the discussion. So it's thrown at you and whatever you say, you cannot prove your point. You will always be wrong. Let's try to bring a specific example here. So suppose we're talking about abortion and abortion is a really, really controversial topic in the society. Some people are opponents to it and imagine that I'm a typical opponent. So I say abortion basically means to kill people. So do you understand, I'm saying to my opponent, do you understand that by supporting abortions, you're supporting killing people? Well, this whole logical connection is basically valid as long as abortion definitely is in fact killing people. But is it though? This is a good question. So you can see that the problem and the bomb lies exactly in that assumption. And it rests on another assumption that a fetus which is being aborted is a real human being, which is not scientifically proven yet. And some people may disagree with that. So that makes all of this structure flawed. Let's continue with a different example. Now we're exploring another type of logical paralysis where the logical conclusion itself is wrong. And the first one would be false cause. I'm sure you've heard this definition quite a lot. Correlation is not the same as causality. So correlation is when two things, two events happen at the same time. Causality means on the other hand and furthermore that one of these events is causing the other. And this is not always the same thing. So this is how it works. Imagine we're talking about some pharmaceuticals. And I'm a pharmaceutical lobbyist, let's say in Congress. I'm trying to back up a new law which would generate new medicine. And I'm arguing the following manner. Have you known that the recent scientific studies actually found out that people with higher levels of HDL cholesterol, which is by the way a good type of cholesterol, normally tend to have heart attacks less frequently. So less often. Well, probably. I'm therefore I'm arguing that we need to produce medicine with HDL cholesterol to decrease the risk of heart attacks in people. This is actually not quite true, even though it may seem so at the first side. Because there are other scientific research which shows that there is a third factor, sports activity, which influences both of the factors, both cholesterol and the reduced risk of heart attacks. So those two are actually not causing one another. Let's move on to a different example of flood inference. And it's called cherry picking. This is a very interesting one. And I would say the most disguised, the most sophisticated. So it's when a person tries to find a data pattern to fit their claim. And it is called cherry picking because that's what we normally do. If we want to pick a berry from a bush, we typically take the best looking one or the most fruitful one and we leave the others. And that's what is happening in reality. So suppose we're talking in that case about climate change. And I'm trying to make a point that climate change is not human cost, but rather, volcanoes are known to emit around 200 million tons of CO2 per year. So obviously, volcanoes are causing global warming, right, which is not completely true either. Because here, it is exactly this one cherry taken from the whole data panel. If you look at the wider data set, it actually occurs that 24 billion tons of CO2 is caused by human activity. So you need to take a look on the whole scope of data in order to make such claims. Let's move on. Another type of example in this logical fallacy group would be appeal to authority. This is also a very common one. It basically means that someone is trying to use a very respected opinion, an opinion of a very respected person in the society to put it weight to prove their point and to discredit you. So saying we're talking currently about AIDS, it is scientifically proven that AIDS is caused by HIV, which is a virus which you could occasionally get having sex with infected people. That's why we all use protection in order to protect ourselves from HIV. But what if I told you that Kerry Mullis, who actually happens to be a biochemist and even a Nobel Prize laureate, held his own scientific research and he disagreed. He found out that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. So does it mean that we don't need to have protected sex anymore? Well, this appears to be wrong as well. And this is probably would be quite obvious in that example that we shouldn't listen to one person's opinion in order to judge. However, you can probably feel the weight of the Nobel Prize winner and how it can confuse you in that particular case. Let's move on to another type of logical fallacies where the claim itself is replaced. So this is probably the funniest one because here's when the discussion goes completely off topic. So this is called strawman. And it's called like this because that's what your opponent is trying to do. So they are trying to create a dummy of your claim in order to make it easier to attack. So let's move on to a different example. And here we're talking about laws banning beer advertising. So say you would argue that beer is actually quite unharmful. This is a mild and soft alcohol drink. So why don't we just relax laws on beer advertising? And your opponent says no, we shouldn't absolutely not do that. Because we because drugs are evil to the society, and we should ban them completely. Technically speaking, beer contains alcohol and alcohol is considered to be a drug. However, drugs are a wider category. They also include narcotics. So obviously, this argument is stronger. And it's misplaced, as you can see. On the one hand, your previous argument doesn't make sense. On the other hand, probably your opponent will take the attention of your audience because they play with their emotions. Let's use another another example here, and talk about strawman in a different case. So suppose we're on a presidential conference. And one, you are a newspaper journalist, and you're saying that there is a new power plant being constructed in North Carolina, and it's projected to pollute all of the rivers. So Mr President, could you please ban this power plant construction? And I would, my response to you would be, how dare you prevent creation of new workplaces? How dare you? You should be ashamed. So as you can see, the claim again is tweaked here. And my previous, your previous bad image of the plant construction is replaced with another pro of this plant construction. So the argument doesn't make sense anymore. And the final logical fails you will focus today. It is called two coquet. And it's basically a personality attack. It's when your opponent is trying to damage you or undermine your credibility to prove you wrong. And it is called two coquet because two coquet stands in latent for even you. And these were the words said by Julius Caesar when he saw that he was stabbed by Brutus, even you. So it resonates a lot with finger pointing. And that's how it goes. So again, we're talking about climate change. You're making a point that climate change should be stopped. And my response to you would be, Mr. Opponent, as far as I remember, you also travel by planes. So you're probably contributing significantly to a pollution as well. So could you please shut up? And you're not the eligible person to talk about this whatsoever. So in the real discussion, the takeaway here is that sometimes what your opponent basically does, they're pointing out that you're not following your own rules and you're all standpoint which you're advocating for. And you could be potentially confused by that. Don't fall into that trap. What are the key takeaways of our talk today? So first of all, logical fallacies, what are they? They're flawed or incorrect ways to connect arguments with the claims they're supposed to prove. And secondly, and this is very important, there are a lot of logical fallacies. Sometimes they're disguised. Sometimes it's very difficult to spot them because they're hidden in an ambiguous language. The easiest way to be able to combat them is to learn all of them. So please, you're welcome to Wikipedia. Just read all the articles by 150. Please let me end my talk on the note that I deeply believe that if we all refrain from using such techniques in our own reasoning, I think that the world will be better off and the society will have better quality of public discussions in our society. Thank you. I need to sip my blue wine. So we said everyone uses logical fallacies. It means you use them too. How dare you talk about them then? I see one question over there. Hi, thanks a lot for the presentation. It's really interesting. So one question, not everyone of us, actually everyone of us is only expert in one area. So that means there are so many things that we don't know. How can we recognize the logical fallacies for the area that we have no idea about? Because I think when you argue in a specific area, some of the arguments, that's why they're called logical fallacies, because you recognize these logical patterns and you can fit as you've seen. I've also brought examples from different areas, right? But they all fit this logical form and it is just pretty simple to recognize it. If maybe you do some expert research, as in the case with volcanoes, but most of them are actually easily recognizable disregardless of your area. I just have the feeling that it's in the newspaper every day. It's like a lot of logical fallacies. It's not possible to do ever research for ever topic. So yeah. Well, actually if you go to the... So there are even websites which collect very frequent climate change fallacies. I think there are also like around 40 arguments. There are even like real blogs and forums which are dedicated to this topic. So there are, I would say, common ones in each area. If I can also suggest something else. You said you're afraid you're not an expert in every topic. Well, come to our following events and it's only a matter of time. So any other questions? I see one raised hand over there. Thanks for the lovely talk. It was very interesting. Which one of the fallacies do you think is the hardest to recognize for yourself? For myself. I would say that so cherry picking is very hard to recognize because that goes in the direction of what the lady before you said. You need to be aware of the data scope in each field and if you're not a professional it would be difficult for you. One other question in the middle? Thank you. Very engaging talk. I have a question regarding the use of fallacies by autocrats, dictators and so forth. So for instance, President Trump has once claimed that the Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers. So what we have seen that this was this was really widely circulated in the media and I have also read a lot of reports of the people who are really supporting this very dangerous idea. Now we know that with the help of social media and mass media, dictators and autocrats are using fallacies very efficiently. So what's your take on that? So how a general public can fight with this logical fallacy? So in an ideal world, if I were president, I would introduce a beep-beep sound every time someone says it. But I think that actually Facebook is working on developing some AI and machine learning based algorithms to recognize fake news and that's how they work. I think the first principles which they're integrating to this mechanism are actually based on logical fails. So they just analyze the natural language and they try to connect the sense of the sentences and they come to the conclusion that the news is fake. So I think they're working on it. Interesting. So I can post lies on Facebook anymore. Okay, I guess we would have time for one more short question of the guy in the blue t-shirt. So I just have this person question to you. What do you think about religion and these fallacies? How do you connect those and what is your thinking upon all this? Yeah, well I am personally an atheist. Okay, but what was the question again? So I mean religion and all these sacred texts they have their own explanations and they have their own beliefs and people believe in them, a lot of people believe in them. How do you connect your talk and your logics to religious people? How do you convince them with all of this? I don't think you like really need to try to aggressively convince someone of something. So I think that that religion is a private matter of every person, every individual and obviously there are a lot of videos on YouTube on people and especially atheists who try to debug kind of all these beliefs but that contributes a lot to conflict maybe in the society. So I would try to keep it calmer at least at least this particular matter. So you are censoring it right? I mean you are trying to censor it. I mean you're not keeping it private means you are trying to not talk about it. I mean there should be a clear, there shouldn't be, but I mean there should be right logically. Yeah, I think you need to talk about such things. You definitely need but in with a very specific set of rules so that the discussion is kept ethical and no side is trying to really convince somebody of something because that's a private matter. I guess it has been a few millennia, the discussion which God has it right so I guess you'll have enough time to figure it out afterwards too. Thanks for the question. Thank you for your talk.